Bette Nesmith Graham(1924 — 1980)

In the 1950s, Bette Nesmith Graham worked as an executive secretary at a Dallas bank and hated having to retype her letters every time she made a typing mistake. While watching painters decorate the windows for the holidays, she noticed that they never erased their errors: they simply covered them with a fresh coat of paint. That gave her the idea to hide her mistakes with a little white paint instead of retyping everything.

She made her first bottles of correction fluid in her kitchen, mixing tempera paint with a blender. To improve the formula, she sought advice from a chemistry teacher at her son's high school as well as from employees at a paint factory. For years, she filled the little bottles by hand in her garage.

Her son, Michael Nesmith, helped her fill and label the bottles of correction fluid. A few years later, he became a music star by joining The Monkees, an American pop band that was hugely famous in the 1960s.

According to a frequently told story, Bette was fired from the bank after absentmindedly typing the name of her own company instead of her employer's. Far from discouraging her, this dismissal pushed her to devote herself entirely to her correction-fluid business.

In 1979, after turning an idea born in her kitchen into a factory producing millions of bottles a year, she sold her company to the giant Gillette for 47.5 million dollars. She died less than a year later, in 1980, having become one of the most successful businesswomen in the United States.